Well, first of all, Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing posted a link to an article titled Color Coded: Panthro, over at Color, where Monique Jones discusses the racial coding of Panthro -- why we think of him as a black guy even though he's a blue-gray cat person. Obviously Earle Hyman's mellifluous baritone does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's not just that; it's the character design, too -- he's a different, darker color than all the other Thundercats, his features are wider, and his head's shaved.

Anyway, Beschizza's post had this at the bottom:

And I thought hey, that's a pretty good, clean rip of the extended version of Panthro's theme song; somebody must have worked hard splicing that together, and I wonder if there are any more.

I found a few others from the same poster, and by the time I got to this one

it became clear that okay, these are definitely not fan edits, they're original recordings from somewhere.

So then I found a video called Thundercats: The Official Soundtrack (linked because embedding is disabled). It's a 2008 call to action petitioning WB to release a soundtrack album, and it's got samples of a bunch of different tunes "cut from the original master tracks" to demonstrate that they're out there and all WB has to do is publish them.

So what I'd heard in those YouTube videos were, presumably, copies of those original tracks.

I poked around the Internet a bit; there's a thread on FF Shrine that links an incomplete set of the songs (plus some other stuff of questionable provenance) and discusses them in detail.

So yeah, I have a new #2 Unpublished Thundercats Thing I Want Most. (#1 is Lynne Lipton's personal videos of the recording sessions.)

Nice. I think some of those were in Hear the Roar, but there's only so much you can put in the photo section of a book.

I really wish WB saw a profit incentive to publishing stuff like this. Aside from all the other reasons the DVD sets were half-assed disappointments, I wish they could have made a deal with Lynne Lipton to include some of the videos she took of the recording sessions.

Sure, I'm not sold on the style, the tone, or the man-bun. But there really is some loving attention to detail in there. That intro is pleasingly kinetic and does a solid job of summarizing the first few episodes of TOS (and even fixes the series' greatest continuity error, "Where the fuck did Vultureman come from?"), and while, as I said, I don't love the new animation style, they've taken pains to make the character, vehicle, and location designs recognizable as the same ones from TOS. From the opening shot of Thundera to the closing seconds rotating the camera around Lion-O as he raises the sword, it's quite clear somebody paid a whole lot of attention to TOS.

I mean, I like Teen Titans Go! despite its massive departure from Teen Titans. Course, the difference between Teen Titans Go! and what we've seen of Thundercats Roar so far is that Teen Titans Go! is (1) actually funny and (2) not off-puttingly hideous.

Thundercats was always funny, but the humor came from its total lack of self-awareness; it came from the total commitment to take utterly ridiculous shit and play it as melodramatically as possible. I've seen no evidence so far that self-aware, winking-at-the-camera Thundercats can work.

All that said: boy, there's a whole lot of crazy shit there to mine. If nothing else, I look forward to what obscure details they pull out from TOS' run. Dr. Dometone and the Oceanic Plug? Captain Shiner, Captain Cracker, Hammerhand and the Berzerkers? Safari Joe and the Demolisher? The Mad Bubbler? We can take Mandora, Evil-Chaser First Class as a given, right?

Pity about the music. If they had the rights to the music from TOS, they'd have used the theme song in the opening titles. I think using new arrangements of the old songs would have fit the "we're recreating a bunch of obscure and unnecessary details in the new style" approach nicely.

This is what I'm talking about when I mention loving attention to detail. Look at that control room.

Grath wrote:

I mean, poorly promoting a show, dicking around its schedule so that it's never clear when it's going to be on, and then saying "we cancelled it because no one was watching it" is kind of fucking bullshit, though.

Thundercats '11 didn't receive support from Cartoon Network, because Cartoon Network is perpetually chasing its last hit, and any show that does not resemble its last hit gets buried.

Thundercats '11 didn't look like Adventure Time. It got cancelled. Now there's a new Thundercats that looks more like Adventure Time. This isn't fucking rocket science. Don't blame the audience for the decisions the network executives made before the show even aired.

I have no idea what video it was, but Arin told a story once on Game Grumps about being so impressed with the kind of color balance they achieved in Thundercats '11 that he reached out to the lead animator for professional advice, and got a lot of subtle stumping for a job in response. It clearly bothered him that somebody he respected on that level was reduced to trying to get odd jobs from a YouTube video game channel. So yeah, he's just going to say something like that any time the topic of Thundercats comes up now.

(The irony is that the color balance makes it an absolutely ideal UHD rerelease now, while the new show will probably never see physical media.)

All that said: boy, there's a whole lot of crazy shit there to mine. If nothing else, I look forward to what obscure details they pull out from TOS' run. Dr. Dometone and the Oceanic Plug? Captain Shiner, Captain Cracker, Hammerhand and the Berzerkers? Safari Joe and the Demolisher? The Mad Bubbler? We can take Mandora, Evil-Chaser First Class as a given, right?

I'd love to see The Demolisher again as someone who goes around Thundara beating the shit out of everyone and giving no fucks about all the drama. Or a big royal rumble/treasure hunt where Demolisher/Lion-O get a grudging respect going and save each other's asses.

Brentai wrote:I have no idea what video it was, but Arin told a story once on Game Grumps about being so impressed with the kind of color balance they achieved in Thundercats '11 that he reached out to the lead animator for professional advice, and got a lot of subtle stumping for a job in response. It clearly bothered him that somebody he respected on that level was reduced to trying to get odd jobs from a YouTube video game channel. So yeah, he's just going to say something like that any time the topic of Thundercats comes up now.

I don't have a problem with having a chip on his shoulder because Thundercats '11 got canceled. As you may have noticed, I'm kind of unhappy about that myself.

I'm just saying that the correct outlet for that frustration is not the fucking fans. They're not the ones who decided to follow up Panthro getting his arms cut off with a four-month break followed by the back half of the series airing on a different day and time.

Destynova wrote:I'd love to see The Demolisher again as someone who goes around Thundara beating the shit out of everyone and giving no fucks about all the drama. Or a big royal rumble/treasure hunt where Demolisher/Lion-O get a grudging respect going and save each other's asses.

I'd like to see the Demolisher and Safari Joe appear in an episode together, maybe as competitors.

I mean, they're fundamentally the same basic premise; they've each even got a weird little sidekick. It's one of those things about season 1 of Thundercats that just shows how rushed everything was: if they'd had time to sit down and actually plan, you probably wouldn't have had two different episodes with such similar premises.

Brentai wrote:I'd like to see the Demolisher and Safari Joe appear in an episode together, maybe as competitors.

I mean, they're fundamentally the same basic premise; they've each even got a weird little sidekick. It's one of those things about season 1 of Thundercats that just shows how rushed everything was: if they'd had time to sit down and actually plan, you probably wouldn't have had two different episodes with such similar premises.

That could work, perhaps highlight their methods and advantages/disadvantages.

1.Demolisher goes WAGHHHHHHHH! Then proceeds to stomp over everything, he fought Mumm-ra and Lion-O to standstills and lost to Lion-O due to the 23 Minute rule. He is easy to trick/goad though so the More You Know lesson is being able to use your head.

2.Joe uses traps and tricks plus intel to defeat people but is a dirty coward once he runs out of ammo/loses his gun. Maybe set them against each other where Joe killsteals from Demolisher.